Technology Overview

The Integrative Cell Signalling group at the LCSB investigates changes of cellular heterogeneity in health and disease at single cell resolution. In diverse projects including cell differentiation, cancer heterogeneity and brain chraracterization, we develop and apply single cell RNA sequencing (sc-RNAseq) methods such as Drop-seq, CITE-seq, ATAC-seq, Fluidigm C1, InDrop or SPLiT-seq.

The recent technology of single cell transcriptomics and epigenomics allows for in depth characterization of cellular states. Investigating tissue heterogeneity at single cell resolution gives new insights into underlying disease mechanisms and is able to identify driving cellular subpopulations. Combining scRNA-seq technology with membrane-associated protein tagging (CITE-seq) can give additional layer of information in understanding mRNA-protein relationship on a temporal scale. In addition, single cell chromatin accessibility technology (ATAC-seq) allows for identification and profiling of distinct regulatory modules across different cell types within heterogeneous samples. At the LCSB, researchers provide access to these techniques through customized and commercial pipelines and develop targeted bioinformatics analysis methods to integrate the high-dimensional data.

Benefits

Inexpensive capturing of whole cell transcriptome on a single cell level (Drop-seq)
Possibility to link scRNA-seq data to 11 or more barcoded protein antibodies (CITE-seq)
10x Genomics can offer even higher transcriptome capturing ratio, which makes it a great tool for investigating nuclei or cells with low transcript abundance (snRNAseq or ATAC-seq)
With an in-house developed analyses pipeline together with some of the leading software available ICS can offer expertise and support dealing with this type of high dimensional data
LCSB researchers have applied scRNA-seq methods in wide range of project from cancer metastasis, immunological responses up to neurodegeneration

Single Cell OMICS Technologies